Here's a question for the list since there's seems to be so much action on it
at the moment.  Actually, it's more a request for comments/advice.

First some background:

I teach at an all-boys,  private school in NYC. We've recently decided to
revise our Latin curriculum to make it better meet the needs of our students
and not to keep it around just for tradition.  We see a great benefit to
Latin, which is why we have revised the curriculum and not ditched.  We just
feel that in an elementary-middle school (we're K-9) there were more pressing
issues for us to be dealing with with the students than whether they had
memorized their chart of neuter third declension nouns.

We have revised the Latin curriculum in the following way, based on our
observations that the two most important spin-offs we saw from teaching Latin
were the ability for students to use etymological information to approach
words and the ability to see grammatical structures.

The vocabulary was a no-brainer and we have begun teaching roots and affixes
directly, starting in 3rd grade, and are attempting to meld this instruction
with traditional instruction in syllabication and spelling.

Using an abridged Latin curriculum to highlight grammatical structure is
proving more elusive though we know that approaching structure through Latin
before approaching it through English allows students to see certain
structures more clearly.  For example, by discussing nominative, accusative
and verbs in Latin, our students really see these not as words but as
grammatical elements. They don't have a lot of difficulty accepting that
clauses and nouns can both be subjects that the rest of the sentence
predicates about.

My questions for the list are:

Are we nuts?
If not (If we are you need go no further) what do people think about the best
way to approach the grammar strand of this curriculum might be.  Looking at
the KISS website, what we had already planned to do seems pretty much in
keeping with what ED has outlined (frighteningly so, I might add).

Any advice, questions to stimulate thought, or comments would be greatly
appreciated.

Steve Cohen